From Lufthansa to the CIA, Turkey’s government has come up with some worrying conspiracy theories to explain Gezi Park

It has to be said that when the Turkish government began to flail around for the “real reasons” behind the Gezi protests, their initial conspiracy theories lacked imagination – the CIA, Europeans jealous of their economic success, unspecified foreign forces in cahoots with terrorists, Twitter, the “interest rate lobby”, and, of course, the international Jewish conspiracy. What would a search for a scapegoat be in Turkey (or indeed Greece) without our old friends the Elders of Zion?

As recently stated Ekşi Sözlük is one of the major internet sites that harbored an internet user culture in Turkey. From time to time, it has been targeted by conservative or Islamist citizens who are quite annoyed with the existence of such a major independent site despite the growth of Facebook and Twitter. There are more than 20 thousand contributors to the site and it is hard to define a particular ideology that governs these users. Everybody can find a spot as long s/he contributes good entries. However, Islamists in their usual ranting of victimization believe that they are excluded from the site. Instead, they want it to be shut down.

I believe that there is an understanding that there must a more concentrated attack against Ekşi Sözlük.

First comes a Twitter TT campaign, claiming that there is blasphemy against Prophet.

As the pro-government logic imagines things in institutional forms, it seems that like buying or silencing all traditional media institutions they can do the same for new media. It is a fallacy they will recognize soon. New media works in different ways and suppressing one medium will not silence the critics…

We all know that the Turkish media are under heavy political pressure by the government. Journalists who have been fired from their papers have made the pressure issue public. Now, many people in Turkey and abroad are more or less aware of the political pressure.

However, there are very few pieces devoted to explaining the other end of the pressure, the stories of journalists who support whatever Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan does.

In this piece I will try to explain those journalists who found themselves in a position of justifying Erdoğan’s unacceptable behavior and actions.

Jim from the UKOpen Rights Group sez, “It seems Cameron and Perry have ignored official government policy, invented their own policy and forced it onto UK ISPs. With no legislation, and no complaints from Lib Dem MPS or the ISPs, we have completely unaccountable “nudge censorship” being forced onto the UK population with no debate.”

The closure of official channels of debate and establishment of migrant detention camps in Athens, has been the capstone to a long process of turning people against the most vulnerable populations in cities and, by extension, against all that urban culture stands for.

Myths and misinformation feed in to a general lack of ideas about how to save the eurozone

The crisis of the eurozone seems to be going from bad to worse. Not only have the key players not yet found convincing solutions for the fiscal problems in Greece, Ireland and Portugal but we are already witnessing the beginning of a political backlash that could undermine the achievements of decades of European integration. There is generally a lack of ideas about what needs to be done to turn things around so here are my suggestions:

Portugal’s prime minister has ruled out any backtracking on the country’s bailout terms as his revamped government easily won a confidence vote intended to show it has repaired an internal rift over austerity.

Speaking to parliament before the symbolic vote on Tuesday (30 July), Pedro Passos Coelho also said the economy was giving signs of nearing a turnaround after a long, deep recession, showing the country was taking the right path out of its debt crisis.

This piece was originally published in the November 20, 2000 edition of The Nation. It was also published on their website here. Thanks to The Nation for allowing us to include this essay as part of this issue.

On December 20, 1919, under the heading “Scientists as Spies,” The Nation published a letter by Franz Boas, the father of academic anthropology in America. Boas charged that four American anthropologists, whom he did not name, had abused their professional research positions by conducting espionage in Central America during the First World War. Boas strongly condemned their actions, writing that they had “prostituted science by using it as a cover for their activities as spies.” Anthropologists spying for their country severely betrayed their science and damaged the credibility of all anthropological research, Boas wrote; a scientist who uses his research as a cover for political spying forfeits the right to be classified as a scientist.

TWENTY-FIVE years ago, when I was a graduate student, there were departments of natural science that no longer exist today. Departments of anatomy, histology, biochemistry and physiology have disappeared, replaced by innovative departments of stem-cell biology, systems biology, neurobiology and molecular biophysics. Taking a page from Darwin, the natural sciences are evolving with the times. The perfection of cloning techniques gave rise to stem-cell biology; advances in computer science contributed to systems biology. Whole new fields of inquiry, as well as university departments and majors, owe their existence to fresh discoveries and novel tools. read on here

This article could worry anthropologists in training or in practice but it could just as easily excite us. Some would rather wait for handouts and complain about the current state of affairs but not me.

Science works by proposing and disposing of hypotheses. Hypotheses come from a lot of places: previous research results, modeling, inspiration, and plain old intuition. Our intuition is a good source of scientific hypotheses because our species has evolved to possess an implicit model of the natural world that allows us to move, eat, balance, and so forth.

I’m reading a ton of baby and pregnancy books right now, preparing both for the October birth of my daughter and an upcoming BoingBoing feature about evidence-based books for science-minded soon-to-be-parents.

With the 2013 fall semester on the way, people have been visiting the 2012 Best Introduction to Anthropology Syllabus – Four Fields. I’ve re-visited that post and updated the links. The material there is still valuable, and although I’ve been unable to do a more complete scouring of the web, I noted there are more materials at the American Anthropological Association Teaching Materials Exchange. Please find links below for additional four-fields anthropology syllabi available there. I’ve also added syllabus suggestions from introductory courses that do not use a full textbook, which is often difficult to do for a four-fields introduction.

This posting on Aşağı Göbekli (spelling also as Asagi Gobekli I, avoiding diacritical marks), as already indicated in a previous posting, complements our interpretation of the meaning of Göbekli Tepe (Gobekli Tepe) and Göbekli Köyü (Gobekli Koyu) as representing ancient land survey by astronomy. Note that styles of ancient marking at each site vary somewhat, so that the chronological date of origin of all Göbekli sites may not be equivalent.

The ongoing deportation program is resulting a “new type of immigrant” trying to cross the border into the United States, namely undocumented foreigners who have lived illegally for many years in this country and “the only way of life they know is that

Ray Daly of The Washington Post has been writing JavaScript since the 1990s. In May, hespoke at JSConf about “JavaScript journalism” — the idea that just as it took some time for photojournalism to be respected as a distinct field, it’s now proper to define JavaScript journalism as its own thing, a field ready to stand alongside the other prefixes journalists attach to their job titles.

Editor’s note: Back in May, I noted this Quora discussion on how Quartz creates visualizations — charts, mostly — of data so quickly off the news cycle. The answer involved an in-house tool that made it relatively simple to turn a data set into a chart that fit Quartz’ visual aesthetic.

Editor’s note: Two journalism educators — Amy Schmitz Weiss of San Diego State andCindy Royal of Texas State — have provided their own lenses on how journalism education might be reshaped to match the current media landscape students are graduating into.

Karl Rove gets it. So do major advertisers, broadcast networks, and their digital offspring. To be a viable political or commercial force in America’s future, you must be able to understand and connect with an audience that is heavily made up of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans.

Newspapers are doomed and condemned to disappear, in 5, 10 or 30 years. Those are the predictions about the future of the press in United States and the whole world. It seems to be a fact: digital journalism jeopardized the revenues of newspapers and their existence.

The news world already has produced enough news for a whole year in the first half of 2013. What lies ahead for the second half of the year? We’ve got all kinds of clear trend lines, large and small, and can pick out three overarching phenomena:

At Source, Jacob Harris notes that, as appealing as the Twitter API may be as a source of what-people-are-thinking data, it’s hardly perfect. Twitter’s demographics are representative of either Internet users as a whole or the broader population, and geocoding data is sparse and inconsistent.

Every weekend, Longform shares a collection of great stories from its archive with Slate. For daily picks of new and classic nonfiction, check out Longform or follow @longform on Twitter. Have an iPad? Download Longform’s app to read the latest picks, plus features from 70 of the world’s best magazines, including Slate.

Snowden, Greenwald, and the tech pushback: Again this week, we got more of the three core elements of the U.S. National Security Agency leaks aftermath: More revelations about the breadth of NSA spying and attempts to further uncover that information, more developments in leaker Edward Snowden’s attempts to find a safe home, and more debate over the journalistic merits of The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald, who broke the story. Briefly, in turn:

Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) deputy Ayla Akat Ata submitted an official inquiry to Family and Social Policies Minister Fatma Şahin, asking whether the ministry is working on any legislations to avoid trans murders and other related hate crimes in Turkey.

Gaye, a trans woman working as flower seller, has been found dead in her apartment, rising the death toll of trans people to 4 in 7 months. “We need a law to combat against hate murders,” said Ebru Kırancı from Istanbul LGBTT.

The fallout from the June protests in Turkey is settling into a growing pattern of reprisal against those dissenting against Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, critics of his government say. But that pattern may be backfiring, as it is fueling further discontent among Erdoğan’s opponents, and bolstering their ranks with some of his former supporters

Police once more seized the grave stones in the park symbolically dedicated to those who died during Gezi Resistance. This morning’s police intervention also resulted in the detention of 16 homeless people and a human rights activist from Germany

The sacking of Yavuz Baydar from his role as ombudsman of Sabah demonstrates the extent of the PM’s influence

You’re a big cheese Turkish industrialist who admires the prime minister. Indeed, you made his son-in-law your CEO. And you also own a great Istanbul daily paper you want to be taken seriously, so you named one of the country’s most respected journalists your ombudsman. He’s your outward and visible guarantee of editorial freedom. But then, after too many disappointments, he writes an article for the New York Times that says “dirty alliances between governments and media companies and their handshakes behind closed doors damage journalists’ role as public watchdogs and prevent them from scrutinising cronyism and abuses of power: one need only follow the money”.

The overseas interest has waned but our protests continue amid a brutal government crackdown and give us reason to smile

On 25 June, three weeks after the Gezi Park protest started, an American friend sent me an email. He asked me whether I was OK, and hoped that the protests hadn’t “affected me in a negative way”. There was something in his tone that suggested that he thought the protests were already in the past, the camp in the park having been liquidated on 15 June. He was wrong; they have continued ever since. Why?

Bradley Manning was convicted (PDF) on 19 counts today, including charges under the Espionage Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act for leaking approximately 700,000 government documents to WikiLeaks. While it was a relief was that he was not convicted of the worst charge “aiding the enemy,” the verdict remains deeply troubling and could potentially result in a sentence of life in prison. The sentencing phase starts tomorrow and a fuller legal opinion from the judge should also come soon.

As anticipated as a conviction was, today’s news of the federal state winning convictions against Bradley Manning on all counts except the excessive, absurd, and unjustifiable charge of “aiding the enemy,” is still very sad news. For Bradley Manning, the

A US court has acquitted Pfc. Bradley Manning of “aiding the enemy”, the most serious of charges against him, but convicted him of 5 counts of espionage over his role in providing classified information to the whistleblower site Wikileaks.